Contentions

Although not the first to look at the mullahs’ favorite Washington power couple, Michael Crowley does a particularly adept job at revealing the depths of Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett’s shilling for the Iranian regime and for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, personally:

I asked the Leveretts why, if Ahmadinejad enjoys such broad support, his regime has cracked down so brutally. In fact, they told me, Ahmadinejad has shown restraint. “It’s become politically incorrect and impossible to say it, but … this government hasn’t even begun to deploy the force it’s capable of using,'”says Hillary. (Even the videotaped shooting of Neda Agha-Soltan on a Tehran street was an ‘exceptional’ and ‘isolated’ case, she says.) . … The Leveretts also sought to account for Ahmadinejad’s threats against Israel as shrewd regional politics. “It does get to him when he’s described to the outside world as anti-Semitic. He would describe himself as anti-Zionist,” Flynt explains. ‘Resistance to Israel is an important theme to him. … If it’s crazy, it’s crazy like a fox.'”

Flynt still denies, in the face of multiple credible accounts, that he was fired by the Bush administration. And then there is a curious reference by the Leveretts to matters that one would think are not for public discussion. Crowley writes: “By last spring, they were warning that Obama had already ‘lost’ Iran, complaining that he had not halted Bush-era covert programs against Iran’s nuclear program.” Are the Leveretts going so far as to comment on covert operations, however obliquely? Certainly, they would know the peril in which they might find themselves for commenting publicly on top-secret matters.

But Flynt and Hillary are remarkably candid about their about-face on Iran and Israel:

Hillary says her dealings with Iranian diplomats as a Bush White House aide at the start of the Afghanistan war made her understand Tehran’s willingness to engage. “It seems that the Leveretts are almost frozen in time circa 2003 on this,” says Tufts University professor Daniel Drezner. The Leveretts have also come to accept the realist critique that Israel occupies too great a role in America’s foreign policy calculus; Flynt clashed with fellow Bush officials about what peace-process concessions Israel should be asked to make, for instance. “For a lot of pro-Israel groups, these [views of Iran] are non-starters,” he says.

Or perhaps, on some level, they have actually grown to admire Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In our meeting, I pressed them to say just how they feel about the Iranian leader. Geopolitics aside, did they consider him a despicable human being? “I think he’s actually a quite intelligent man,” Flynt replied. “I think he also has really extraordinary political skills.” “[T]he idea that he’s stupid or doesn’t understand retail politics is also pretty divorced from reality,” Hillary added. But that wasn’t the question.

Crowley notes that the Leveretts’ act is too much even for some of their former admirers. But alas, there must be other rewards for those who so gleefully cheerlead for the butchers of Tehran. And when wounded allies ask, “What are Flynt and Hillary doing?”the answer is simple: making a handsome living, creating a profile, and basking in the glow of J Street and of the other enablers of the anti-anti-mullah brigade.